Painting The Dead

At first I didn't know what they wanted. The dead milled around me,
more and more of them, as if they hoped to catch some last remnant of life from
my living presence. For what seemed an eternity, but would have only been minutes,
I looked into the faces of the dead that pressed around me as I hovered there
above the floor desperately wanting to know what had brought them to me. There
were those whose memories of life were still vivid and who did not want to completely
give up life yet. I saw others like me also surrounded by those who had passed
on.

And in the world of the living, people laugh and cry, living out full beautiful
lives, but here in this place, the dead only dream of life and crave a reminder
that they too once had flesh.

Alone among the dead, I saw many faces and many races of those who had come
before. They come to us and we paint them with living colors in the way each
specifies so that they may be as they were before. I brought out my paints as
others like me, who were nearby, had already begun. The dead pressed against
me every one lonely within the multitude of their numbers.

And for years I worked, bringing unique joy to those who could no longer breathe
the sweet, sweet scent of an autumn afternoon, or feel the caress of a lover,
but only dream of what these things were and what they meant. And so I painted
the dead. Each one as special and nonexistent as the next, yet they depended
on me. They needed what I and a few others could give them. For awhile when
the living paint swirled and glowed upon them, they were alive and they could
almost pretend that they were also reborn. They remembered life and they could,
though fleetingly, experience its loving breath.